University of Alabama professor's treatment methods yield results

A University of Alabama professor’s positive intervention methods yielded positive results for boys on the Vacca campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services this summer.

By Ashley ChaffinStaff Writer | The Tuscaloosa News

A University of Alabama professor’s positive intervention methods yielded positive results for boys on the Vacca campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services this summer. Randy Salekin, a psychology professor and clinical child psychologist, brought the components he uses for treatment at the UA Disruptive Behavioral Clinic on campus to the DYS to help more severe conduct cases.Salekin utilizes the biology behind the brain and behavior, making goals and working toward them, and positive reinforcement.The summer began with him and his team of graduate students giving the staff at DYS workshops about the brain and behaviors of children they would be treating.“Part of what we were doing there was giving them more information from science that would help them understand the people they are working with,” he said.The young people on the DYS Vacca campus are court-committed. They receive various services that are important to positive youth development, according to the Vacca website. The children have a variety of problems, such as defiance and conduct disorders.“We don’t know exactly what they’ve done. At this point, they’ve gone through several warnings with the police and maybe a detention center and now they are at the point where they are being held there for 10 weeks,” he said.The intervention began for the kids the same way it did for the staff — by learning about the biology of their brain. Salekin and his team use a laptop computer and LCD displays to explain brain plasticity and how the brain develops. “A lot of kids will say, ‘This is how my family is or this is how I am,’” said Liz Adams, who is studying towards her doctorate in clinical child psychology at UA and works at the UA Disruptive Behavioral Clinic. “It gives them an understanding that what they do and what they decide is in their control, and it even can change their patterns of behavior or the way they think. It gives them a sense of self control.” Throughout the 10-week treatment, the staff has them making and keeping goals each week. “What we are trying to do there is each week besides talking to them about the brain we are getting them to do something that involved making plans that they can specifically follow through on,” Salekin said. “If they give us a global goal like ‘I want to be a better person.’ Well, we all want to be a better person. They’ll have to make a specific plan about that. It could be about a specific relationship, they have to have an exact plan for how to fix that relationship and follow through with that.”Salekin said improving relationships with parents was a common goal among the youth on the Vacca Campus and in the UA Disruptive Behavior Clinic. An example of something they would have to do to work towards that goal is write a gratitude letter to their parents.Within the clinic, Salekin and his team saw a lot of success in their program throughout the three assessments they gave the youths on campus. The assessments Salekin uses occur before, during and after the treatment and measure callousness, positive emotions, developmental maturity and amenability to treatment.“One of the things we know is that the positive emotion goes up from the time that we started and the callousness goes down,” Salekin said. “The other two increase across the study. Besides that, the reporting from the staff also says that the kids are more cooperative and better behaved on campus.”Salekin said he has seen these positive interventions work on a daily basis at the UA Disruptive Behavior Clinic. At the clinic, they serve kids based on community and court referrals for mostly first-time offenders. Adams said as therapists at the clinic they work closely with the kids so they know they are dedicated to each individual youth. “I had a really cool patient, a teenager,” Adams said. “With one of my specific clients, he really latched onto the positive approach because a lot of times things in their life are going very positively so they really latch onto that ... They are really interested in having a new start, they know not everything is going to be perfect or fixed or corrected after nine sessions, but they’re on their way to starting their new life.”“That client that I was talking about has even stayed on passed his sessions and that was his choice not his mom’s because he thought it was helping him.”